A digital rights management aApproach for gray-level images

This paper presents a digital rights management approach for gray-level images. The ownership of the original image is identified with an ownership statement, which is a gray-level image as well. The proposed scheme utilizes block truncation coding (BTC) to create a master share, which is then used to produce an ownership share against the ownership statement. When in doubt about the property of an image, the author should address his/her ownership share to reveal the ownership statement to claim the ownership. Since our method does not embed the ownership statement into the host image, we can register more than one ownership statements for a single image without destroying the former ownership statements. Besides, the original image does not need to involve in the process of identifying the ownership. Finally, experimental results will show the robustness of our scheme against several common attacks.